School name change honors Slaton teacher who gave career her all

SLATON - The name of an elementary school has been changed to honor a woman who arrived there four decades ago and left only when her health failed.

Slaton's West Ward Elementary School has been renamed the Cathelene Thomas Elementary School.

Most of the school's student body - nearly 500 kindergarten through third-graders - as well as employees and area residents gathered on the school's lawn Friday for a name-changing ceremony.

"Cathelene had no children of her own, but every child who walked in these doors behind me she loved as her own," said David Gossett, president of the Slaton Independent School District Board of Trustees.

Thomas taught first grade and reading at the school for 48 years, from 1958 to 2006.

She died of cancer in January of this year.

"Right after she passed away it was so hard for us," said Minnie Barry, the school's secretary.

Thomas taught Barry, as well as Gossett, in the first grade. She did so for many people in the community of some 6,000 built around the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and farming.

"I respected her so much," Barry said of the school's namesake.

Thomas, who never married, first came to the Slaton school as a student teacher from Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, where she received her degree, said her younger sister, Fran Bird of Plainview.

Bird said her older sister, who was born in the East Texas town of Palestine, was a natural teacher.

"From the time she was 6, she knew she wanted to be a schoolteacher," Bird said.

That was the year Thomas got a chalkboard for Christmas, said Bird, who also chose the teaching profession, but has retired.

Thomas used the board to teach her baby sister, four years her younger, the alphabet, Bird said.

Colleagues and former students said Thomas never raised her voice, encouraged struggling as well as excelling students and devoted her life to her profession.

The school's principal, Charles Thompson, remembered stumbling upon a crying Thomas at the end of one school year.

"She said, 'At the end of the year I can't stand it. I have to be away from my family and my babies in the summer,' " Thompson said.

Thomas would probably be embarrassed to know a school was named in her honor, former students and family said.